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Lemmy.World Announcements @lemmy.world lwadmin @lemmy.world

A message to new users

Hello World!

The last week or so we have seen quite a big 'boost' in the amount of new users signing up so we thought it would be a good time to highlight some things that are of interest to new users.

CODE OF CONDUCT

Lemmy World is not a free speech instance, there are a couple of ground rules that need to be followed. If you're new, I would advise you to read our Code of Conduct.

NEW USER QUESTIONS

If you are new to the fediverse as a whole, it might all be a bit overwhelming. What is Lemmy? What is federation? What even is an instance? For those questions I would suggest you have a look at the getting starting guide. It should cover most of your questions.

STILL HAVE QUESTIONS?

You can head over to the [email protected] community. This community should be used for questions regarding Lemmy World and is not the support community for the Lemmy software this site uses.

Our Admin @quinten recently made a post covering the most recurring questions there too. Read about that here.

ALTERNATIVE USER INTERFACES

Lemmy World hosts a few custom User Interfaces which give you a completely different experience both on the desktop as on mobile.

THIRD PARTY APPS

There are a lot of Third Party apps available for Lemmy. From Paid to Open Source, you will find something that suits you easily.

For a complete list of apps have a look at https://lemmyapps.netlify.app/ (Thanks [email protected]).

EDIT: Updated the apps list. Also some more interesting links in @[email protected]'s post here: https://lemmy.world/comment/3962001

EDIT 2: Instead of https://photon.lemmy.world you can now just go to https://p.lemmy.world. You can thank @[email protected] laziness for that.

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  • I feel right at home in the fediverse, it gives me a much more secure feeling than Reddit. Thank you devs for your hard work at creating a suitable alternative.

    • So, on that topic of "security" - just remember that whenever you post, your post is essentially sent to every "instance" that is federated (and listening for the community you posted to). Each instance is it's own server running it's own version of an activitypub implementation (lemmy, mastadon, etc).

      So on lemmy.world that means your post is sent to literally thousands of servers that you cannot directly influence. If you delete a post, a request is made to those servers to also delete the post, but if that instance is modified or unavailable when the request is sent (it'll re-try, but there's a limit how many times), then it's possible your post will not be deleted and you'll never know.

      Keep in mind this also means that anyone, say a government or private company, can establish an instance, federate, and receive the posts of everyone. Their instance may be nearly completely invisible - so you won't know they're collecting that information.

      However, lemmy stores and sends almost no information about any user. A user profile does not contain IP address or country or anything. All of that stays in the server logs of the instance you originate from, and never enters the database. So your "true" personal information isn't shared, but your account name, and a link to your account, and the post content (whatever text you add) is shared.

      Lastly, images tend to be shared. Lemmy uses "pict-rs" which is a FOSS image hosting server, and when an instance receives a federated post, if there is an image in the "URL" field, then it will ask pict-rs to download that image to its server for easier serving to its users.

243 comments